Storytelling: Poetic Reflections Towards Anti-Racist, De-Colonial Futures
Veronica Kimani
20/11/2023
As part of the Decolonization, Indigenization and Antiracism in Universities workshop, Dr Carlos Azevedo and I hosted the session, ‘Storytelling and Narrative Methods’ on the 27th of July to a room of attendees in Alberta and many more joining online on Zoom. This decolonial workshop was a pilot of practice and method. Our aim was to create a space to reflect on how we can break the superiority of theory by thinking through how stories affect knowing and what we can share with stories. The session invited four researchers to share their stories and the methodologies they have used in their research and praxis, which included anti-racist and decolonial approaches. Our audience both in the room in Alberta and online were invited to co-create the session with us, where we held a space to reflect, share and unpack stories, poems, songs, pictures or even just motivations for each other's presence. Together, we reflected on storytelling as a method of making possible our collective and individual freedom dreams, grounding it as a practice central to many Native and Black communities historically.
The workshop began with readings that encouraged us all to create and tell stories. We wanted our participants to take an analytical frame that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method adopted by Canadian Black feminist Katherine McKittrick, and shared by many Black feminists who I drew from in this workshop. This is a method that demands openness, a method that returns to storytelling as a tool to resist erasure and assumed voicelessness for those on the margins. I began by reading a passage from ‘Dear Science and Other Stories’ by McKittrick (2021, p.7) whose writing on ‘sharing’ and storytelling as a Black feminist method has been of great inspiration in my own PhD research. She says:
“Sharing can be uneasy and terrifying, but our stories of black worlds and black ways of being can, in part, breach the heavy weight of dispossession and loss. Our shared stories of black worlds and black ways of being breach the heavy weight of dispossession and loss because these narratives (songs, poems, conversations, theories, debates, memories, arts, prompts, curiosities) are embedded with all sorts of liberatory clues and resistances, Sharing, therefore, is not understood as an act of disclosure but instead signals collaboration and collaborative ways to enact and engender struggle”1.
McKittrick is a professor and academic, writer, and editor whose work focuses on Black Studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which liberation emerges in Black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). In ‘Dear Stories’ McKittrick urges us to engage with storytelling as a way to hold on to the rebellious methodological work of sharing ideas in an unkind world. In sharing the passage from this text, it was my aim to prompt the audience to consider how Black women deploy storytelling, to make sense of, resist, transform, and heal from patriarchy, racism, and colonization. It was a prompt to reflect on how storytelling is a mode through which Black women can turn inwards to make sense of the outer world. It was a prompt to engage us all in discussions on the ways storytelling is a method from which we can build solidarities and affirm both our subjecthood and complex realities.
In reading this passage, it was my aim to engage with, and extend, McKittrick’s radical Black feminist method in which she proposes ‘sharing’ as a significant research modality of Black methods. Taking a stand against the historical and ongoing dehumanization of Black knowledge, McKittrick engages with the re-humanizing politics of sharing that goes beyond a ‘revelation’ or an extractive research exercise. This insight is extrapolated by her bringing the fullest spectrum of methods for living that are harnessed by Black people and shared within and among Black communities in different ways to assert life, surviving, and creating in a world that black people experience as inherently “unkind” (McKittrick, 2021, p.7). I described how in my own PhD research; this method has provoked me to reflect seriously on the kind of sharing that took place in the context of Kenya - when I conducted my fieldwork in Nairobi marketplaces during October 2022. I urged our participants to reflect on how McKittrick’s framing of sharing can open generative conversations across geographies and histories as well as make clearer the tensions and contradictions of doing so. I too reflected on what kind of knowledge was made in the field when the women who were sellers in the market shared their songs, conversations, theologies, and practices of self-care with me when I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork.
I then engaged with poetry beginning with that of Audre Lorde, whose writings on using our words to navigate living on the margins have been a guiding light in my life. In her life and work, she confronted and addressed injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia and in the following poem, ‘A Litany for Survival,’ encourages the marginalized to speak up because either way, we were never meant to survive.
“... And when the sun rises we are afraid
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.”2
I then drew from another poem by Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’ that encourages us to embody the power that is storytelling through poetry for women. In this poem, Lorde discusses how poetry coins the language to express and navigate our inner worlds and the awareness we have of the outer world. How it provides a very tangible means to manifest safer and freer realities. Only poetry, Lorde explains, exists at the intersection of possibility and reality mediating these two realms and guiding us towards experiencing better and new worlds. It is through poems and the raw truths they hold that we find a method through which we on the margins can establish a path for our hopes and dreams to move from thought, into stories, into tangible action. In her poems, Lorde reminds us that our poems, stories embodying our souls, hold what we feel within and that which we sometimes go beyond to make real. With little to emulate as Black women, the poems hold our most dreaded fears as well as our biggest hopes and they are revolutionary in that they offer a pathway which gives rise to these thoughts and feelings and pave the way for us to develop them into ideas and reality.
Through this mode of storytelling, Lorde returns us to traditional ways of connecting to and honoring our feelings as women. A move from Eurocentrism and colonial knowledges which do not make space for these inner, more sacred, more secret parts of us. These secret places where feelings are so closely held are a channel for insurmountable creativity and power for women. Through poetry, Lorde reminds us that women can make real those feelings otherwise excluded from our worlds, empowering our vulnerabilities and truths. Poetry, which I offered in this workshop, is as a method for ‘freedom’ in how it can help to create a language of our inner worlds and hopes so accurately and only through language can we make manifest freedom.
“... the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell. The story asks that we live with what cannot be explained. The story opens the door to curiosity; the urgencies for evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with a creative precision.” 3
Through storytelling and with poetry as one method, this workshop explored the precision with which our inner and outer worlds as people subjected to colonial and racist violences can be validated, as well as and more importantly, how new worlds can be built with this same precision.
1. McKittrick, K, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) 7.
2 Lorde, A. The Black Unicorn (London: Penguin Books, 2019)
3 McKittrick, K, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) 7.